Google Guns for Amazon Web Services with New Storage, App Engine Offerings
Google is turning up the heat with its cloud services for the enterprise. Today the company bundled up several announcements ranging from the Cloud SQL service in limited preview to promoting Cloud Storage out of Google Labs.
Context & Ripple Effects
When Business Week asked in May 2009 what was holding back Google Apps, the obstacle was enterprise credibility at the productivity-application layer. This announcement shows Google attacking the problem from underneath: instead of selling office software to cautious IT buyers, it is selling infrastructure — the layer where Amazon Web Services had faced little serious competition.
Concretely, Google moved Cloud Storage out of Google Labs into a supported product and put Cloud SQL, a relational database service, into limited preview, both positioned alongside App Engine as an enterprise cloud stack aimed squarely at AWS.
First-order effects
- Enterprise developers weighing AWS for storage and databases gain a second credible large-scale option, with Cloud Storage now carrying product-grade support rather than Labs-era experimental status.
- Google's own App Engine platform becomes more complete: applications built on it can now pair with managed storage and a relational database instead of bolting on third-party services.
Second-order effects
- Amazon Web Services faces feature-and-price pressure on its storage and database tiers, since Google is bundling comparable services with App Engine as a single stack.
- Other enterprise software vendors competing for developer mindshare must decide whether to match Google's managed-database-and-storage bundle or cede the low end of the infrastructure market.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, competition among consumer-web giants shifts down-stack from applications to raw compute, storage, and database services, making cloud infrastructure a contested multi-vendor market rather than a single-company franchise.
- Limited-preview launches like Cloud SQL's become a standard competitive weapon, letting providers seed enterprise workloads early and convert them before rivals reach general availability.
The trend: Consumer-web giants are moving down-stack into enterprise cloud infrastructure, turning what was effectively an AWS franchise into a multi-player platform battle.